Overall I agree, but that is all a part of giving a manager the benefit of a full season and summer transfer window to set up their squad in a way that suits their preferred tactics and coaching. It wouldn't have mattered who was managing us this year, we were never going to be good with players like Hojlund and Zirkzee as our primary goal scoring threats.
I agree that it's difficult to judge him given that he's come part-way through a season with players going, and it's a real hodgepodge of a squad. But, there are no guarantees that he's ever going to get all or even most of the players he's going to need to fully maximise his tactics and intentions...whatever they may be.
We can talk about who the strikers should be, but all I saw today were, at times, all 11 players at times behind the ball, with us camped in our own box for large portions of that game. We had two real opportunities in that first half, which was that lovely move that resulted in the Zirkzee chance, and then the one we scored from. Aside from that, we could easily have been down at the break.
I've largely been Amorim-in for most of his time here and I fully understand that he's not got it easy. At the same time, the way we were playing today will just not do and we will not win many games playing this way. And, the crucial thing is that we haven't been winning many games this way. We spend too much of our time in our own half as whenever the opposition attack, we go from a back three to a back five...which almost always becomes a back seven with the two central midfielders dropping back, too. That only leaves three players to act as our outlets going the other way, and if they also drop back as they quite often do, that leaves us with nothing. When teams come onto us, we've got nothing to hit them back with. We're too reliant on our centre backs having the ball, to the point where we play ourselves into trouble from goal kicks or whenever we restart play with the keeper.
All I can see Amorim doing is largely the same thing with
possibly better players. I say possibly because we don't know who is actually going to be coming in, as we don't know who the club are targeting. Our recruitment has been shite for the last decade (hence why we're in this mess) and I'm yet to be convinced that is going to be better. He has lost me a little after today due to the way we played, coupled with our lack of tenacity, mobility, doggedness, and the ease of which we make mistakes. I'm sure every other manager in the country would love to have prime Maldini, Pirlo, Zidane, Cruyff and Cantona in their squad, but they don't. Sometimes you've got to make do with what you have got and build from that, improving as you go. The manner in which we played that second half was terrible and just not acceptable. Think the fans will have a meltdown if we put in a performance like that on Thursday against Lyon.